Register for a CSMC workshop
Multilingualism in the Ancient Mediterranean after Alexander the Great
When: Thursday, 1 February 2024, 2:00 pm CET – Friday, 2 February 2024, 1:30 pm CET
Where: Warburgstraße 26, 20354 Hamburg, and online
The empire created by Alexander the Great was hardly comparable to any other seen before in terms of extension and variety of cultures. Encompassing Libya, Egypt, Greece, Armenia, Mesopotamia, Persia, and Bactria, it even reached the Hindu Kush mountains and the faraway lands of the reign of Gandhara. Plutarch’s Life of Alexander the Great offers an account of Alexander’s political actions that explains his imperial ambitions with his love of honour (i.e. philotimia) and the cultural indeterminacy of his native Macedonia. According to Plutarch, these were the main reasons for Alexander’s ideal of promoting Hellenic ideals within a large multicultural empire. Whatever the reasons behind the creation of Alexander’s domain were, the impact of his conquests reverberated in the centuries following his death. The long interaction and intertwining between Greek and various indigenous customs led to the creation of a kaleidoscope of cultural phenomena, which find the most tangible echoes in the written sources known thus far. Greek was introduced as the main administrative language of the kingdom and influenced, to different degrees, the textual production in different settings.
This conference aims to explore the variety of cultural and linguistic phenomena that originated from the interaction between Greek and indigenous traditions in the different regions of the Macedonian empire. The introduction of a new language influenced the production of official written testimonies (i.e. monumental inscriptions) and other types of written artefacts (i.e. ritual objects, coinage). The main goal of this workshop is to examine the multilingual phenomena of the Macedonian lands in their complexity. Therefore, the idea is not only to explore the different degrees of linguistic intermingling between ethnic communities but also how this cultural interaction shaped and transformed the materiality of the written production peculiar to the different domains of this immense empire, for instance, leading to phenomena of hybridisation or, on the contrary, strong conservatism.
Workshop organisers: